She wants to be more than a millionaire

College senior Taryn Brill is making her way in the TV game-show business. When contestants vie for the big prize on ABC's highly rated new game show, Who Wants to be a Millionaire, College senior Taryn Brill helps make sure their nerves don't get the best of them. Since the hit show began with a two-week summer run, Brill, 21, has worked as a contestant coordinator for the new game show which has taken the country by storm, keeping tens of millions of viewers glued to their seats with its dramatic trivia format and colorful staging. While the show enjoys its second run on TV -- ABC has scheduled it to run for 15 consecutive days this month -- Brill is taking a three-week hiatus from her final semester at Penn. The program, filmed in New York, is scheduled to finish its run on November 21, after which Brill will return to Penn to finish her Communications major and Spanish minor. Laughing, she explained that she still has to make up lots of classwork. "I was concerned but at this point, I'm so far behind, what's another week?" she asks. And with this daily schedule, who can blame Brill for not worrying about schoolwork? She arrives at work by 10:30 or 11 a.m. to greet the contestants when they arrive at 11:30. Brill and her partner give them the welcoming "shpiel" and then start interviewing them in order to make up "blue sheets," which are short information cards. Regis Philbin, the host of the show, reads from these cards if the contestant lands in the "hot seat" -- the center stage, where the contestant has the chance to answer 15 questions to win $1 million. While the show is taping, Brill is active behind the camera as well. During commercial breaks, she is at the hot seat with the contestant, calming him or her down. She also instructs the contestants to show some charisma when the camera zooms in on them, for example, giving a thumbs up or a salute. Brill works at least 12-hour days, sometimes not leaving until hours after rehearsal and taping of the show, which usually ends at 10 p.m. Although making the jump from Penn to a nationally aired show and working just a few feet away from famed host Philbin may seem nerve-wracking, Brill swears she's not intimidated. "Never let them see you sweat," she says. And while Brill may be five or six years younger than most of the people she works with on the show, she is hardly a newcomer to the industry, having had valuable internships the past few years. Early in her sophomore year, Brill landed an internship at Picturetube, a video production company. During the latter half of that school year, she worked with Mike Lemon Casting, where she helped cast for well-known movies such as Twelve Monkeys and The Sixth Sense. Simultaneously, she interned at A Wedding Story, which Brill said is the "No. 1-rated daytime show on The Learning Channel." During her junior year, she interned with The Nancy Glass Show at Star 104.5FM, waking up at 5:30 a.m. twice a week to be at work by 8. "My friends think I was nuts," Brill says. Brill also worked as one of the hosts on a pilot for a teen show created by Glass' production company, Glass Difede Productions. She will know in the next five months whether the show will be picked up. But it was during the summer after her sophomore year that her hard work paid off, as Brill was hired as an intern with The Late Show With David Letterman, where a fellow intern told her about a job opening up at "Camp Millionaire." While it may be hard to remember that Brill is still a student, she's scheduled to graduate summa cum laude in December. And she has been on the dean's list every semester she's been at Penn. One of Brill's unique hobbies is keeping up a collection of photos with celebrities. She currently has 25 pictures, with such big names as Conan O'Brien, Sugar Ray, Luke Perry, L.L. Cool J and tennis star Patrick Rafter. But perhaps her biggest obsession is reading People magazine. She anxiously awaits the issue's arrival each Saturday. As for her future after graduation, she plans to stay with Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, for a while, at least. She wants to take head shots and start auditioning for commercials in New York City. And while she would love to be the anchor of Entertainment Tonight, for now, she settles for something less high profile. "My passion is being in front of the camera," she says.